Nanotechnology News – Latest Headlines

The forces of attraction - how cells change direction

Many cell types in higher organisms are capable of implementing directed motion in response to the presence of certain chemical attractants in their vicinity. A team at the Center for NanoScience (CeNS) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) Muenchen has developed a novel technique to expose an ensemble of living cells to rapidly varying concentrations of chemoattractants.

Jul 6th, 2011

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A new way to build nanostructures

The making of three-dimensional nanostructured materials - ones that have distinctive shapes and structures at scales of a few billionths of a meter - has become a fertile area of research, producing materials that are useful for electronics, photonics, phononics and biomedical devices. But the methods of making such materials have been limited in the 3-D complexity they can produce. Now, an MIT team has found a way to produce more complicated structures by using a blend of current "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches.

Jul 6th, 2011

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New microsystem for better drug-testing

A University of Southampton nanoscientist is working on a new microsystem for more efficient testing of pharmaceutical drugs to treat diseases such as cystic fibrosis, MG (myasthenia gravis) and epilepsy.

Jul 6th, 2011

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Extremely rapid water: Scientists decipher a protein-bound water chain

Researchers from the Ruhr-Universitaet-Bochum (RUB) Department of Biophysics of Prof. Dr. Klaus Gerwert have succeeded in providing evidence that a protein is capable of creating a water molecule chain for a few milliseconds for the directed proton transfer. The combination of vibrational spectroscopy and biomolecular simulations enabled the elucidation of the proton pump mechanism of a cell-membrane protein in atomic detail. The researchers demonstrated that protein-bound water molecules play a decisive role in the function.

Jul 6th, 2011

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Suitable materials for making bioreactors inside a bioartificial kidney

A research team led by Daniele Zink and Jackie Y. Ying at the A*STAR Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology has now developed membrane materials and coatings that are suitable for human proximal tubule cells growth and differentiation by modifying the surface of established materials and synthesizing novel materials.

Jul 6th, 2011

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Ultrafast switch for superconductors

A high-temperature superconductor can now be switched on and off within a trillionth of a second - 100 years after the discovery of superconductivity and 25 years after the first high-temperature superconductor was.

Jul 5th, 2011

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Scientists report on a unique 'ubiquitous element strategy' for synthesizing industrially important materials

Japanese scientists report on a unique 'ubiquitous element strategy' for synthesizing industrially important electronic, thermionic, and structural materials using naturally abundant elements. This strategy aims to overcome the 'rare-element crisis' that was triggered by increasing demand for such elements as lithium, used in batteries, and dysprosium for Ne-Fe-B permanent magnets.

Jul 5th, 2011

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